Back to BEARS: Surveying the Most Diachronic Islet (Praso) – The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey

BEARS is back!

After a series of minor miracles (and careful planning), the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey was able to secure funding and permits for a 2021 field season. Our season will be shorter this year (just four weeks), and many of our key team members were unable to travel to Greece due to the pandemic. On the blog this month, you’ll hear some more about COVID, including our team’s mitigation and safety measures and how the pandemic has changed the way we think about archaeology. We’re also planning some posts that are more typical of a good old field archaeology blog (including a highly anticipated archaeological confessional with our fearless leader, Sarah C. Murray). But, let’s not rest on our blogging laurels; we just finished our first week of field work and there is much to report!

On Monday afternoon, we were back sailing the Aegean on the sturdy Solaris, captained by the fearless Vassilis. Our quick nautical commute took us to the islet of Praso, in the western part of the Porto Rafti bay, no more than 400 m south of the Pounta peninsula.

Other sites in the geographic purview of our permit have elicited more anticipation. Praso is not remote – in fact, it was likely connected to the mainland at some point in the past several millennia. Nor does the islet possess the dramatic topography of the larger pyramidal island Raftis or the headland of Koroni at the bay’s southern end. At just a few hundred meters wide, Praso is unassuming—-and home to a yappy flock of nesting seagulls. There’s also been little said of Praso (or Prasonisi) in the scholarly literature. In his team’s mid-20th century search for the Colossus of Porto Rafti, Cornelius Vermeule observed, “On Prasonisi we saw house (foundations) walls on the southeast side, walls like those excavated on the Koroni peninsula.The Roman and Byzantine pottery on this island is very abundant, particularly near or at the southwest corner.” (Vermeule 1962, 81).

The prospect of wading through kilos of combed amphora sherds (a highly diagnostic type of Late Roman ceramic) was exciting to some members of the BEARS team, but didn’t necessarily generate widespread enthusiasm. Still, as our first days in the field passed with a cool breeze at our backs and shrubs needling our shins, there was a palpable feeling of joy and contentment among the team: we were finally doing fieldwork in Greece.

After we gridded the island in 20m x 20m squares and began artifact collection, it became clear that Praso’s assemblage was not only robust, but far more chronologically diverse than Vermeule had indicated. Our work on the islet has already produced significant quantities of Early Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age, Classical, Hellenistic, and Medieval ceramics in addition to Roman and Byzantine material. (Discarded paper face masks, a chronologically diagnostic artifact, also attest to island’s continued use by nearby residents of the mainland.) Multiple kilos of ancient broken roof tiles, especially along the island’s southern edge, suggest that at least one major roofed building once stood on Praso.

What’s more, the Praso assemblage has shown a very different functional profile than its sibling island of Ratfis. The team has collected several ceramic wasters, slag, and pieces of ore, suggesting that the fires of industry may have roared at various points in Praso’s history. Other finds have included glass, figurines, obsidian and chert lithics, and, of course, abundant combed amphora body sherds. A few days of field collection have only begun to reveal the many secrets of this small and deceptively complex islet.

The BEARS blog will be back soon with more updates from Praso! Make sure to check out our “Photo of the Day” series, premiering this Monday.

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